Photo: Ray Burmiston/HBO
This Sunday HBO will air Extras: The Extra Special Series Finale, and so of course we had to do something extra special to celebrate its star and creator Ricky Gervais. We sent Out's features editor, Bill Keith, to sit down with the former (original) Office worker to discuss the intoxication of being "famous," his parade of guest stars and how he almost chucked it all to be a pop star.
You have your fair share of famous folks on Extras. How do you select the guest stars?
For the first season, whenever we read in a magazine article that had a Hollywood A-lister saying, “Oh my favorite show is a thing called The Office,” we'd think, “Oh, we'll cash those chips in one day,” and we did. For the second season, I was confident enough to cold call people and I felt invincible. I thought everyone was going to say yes and they did.But you also have a great range to the level of celebrity and notoriety of your guests.
Sometimes it's not just good enough to have an A-lister because we know everything about them and it's banal. They've got to have something about them, because it's not just an acting role. We do love the baggage. In fact some of the best appearances haven't been A-listers, they've been people who've maybe fallen off the good fortune bus.Like George Michael in this finale.
Yeah, well, he's an A-lister. The good thing about George Michael is that no one can really hurt him; he's above it. He goes and chats around saying “I was picking up blokes in the woods, what you going to do about it? What's the problem?” He's not going to apologize for it, nor should he, of course. But they don't know what to do with George Michael.
Oh, and that pop band he threw out with the bathwater? Saved for posterity and brought to you by the good folks at YouTube:
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